We recently connected with Paulina Popielnicka and have shared our conversation below.

Paulina, appreciate you joining us today. Do you manage your own social media?

As I’m not only a model, but also Social Media Manager, I’ve decided to take care of my own Social Media, with a slight help from a team I hired. I handle all of my posts, direct messages, and stories, while my team helps me stay up to date with all of my statistics/insights, and also helps me to make sure all of my collaboration posts are posted within the deadline I have received from the brands. They also do the negotiations and gain the brand deals for me, I do it on my own sometimes, but my team is almost fully responsible for my email where most of the brand deals come through.

Paulina, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started working in modeling in very early age. I was 8 when I scored my first paid campaign. At that time my god mother worked at a Modeling Agency, so she was always letting my mom know about any audition that I would be a good fit. I wanted to dance more than model, so I stopped commercial modeling when I was 12 to focus on dance training, competitions, and all that. I was still doing many photoshoots at that time, but mostly for art projects, nothing commercial. When I moved to the United States I slowly started to get more and more connections what eventually ended up with me once again fully committing to professional modeling. I was doing lots of photoshoots, music videos, promotional videos and runways as well. When I got into Runway shows I was observing a lot, because this was a brand new experience for me. I really enjoyed looking at the production members and how they worked and at some point I told myself that I’d rather to produce the show than walking in it, so I’ve made it my goal really and only a few months after that idea in my head I started working in Fashion Show productions – I feel like a fish in the ocean while working production, it definitely got my heart fully, mostly because it was me combining both of the worlds – Management and Modeling. Working production made me realize that I have been present in Social Media, well actually Internet overall since I can remember and the knowledge I have could be a good use for others, so I’ve decided to start working in Social Media Management, because I simply knew and believed I am very good at it. As of today I still do lots of modeling, but honestly a lot of it is now brand deals, podcasts and music video appearance (which I can’t complain about). I manage my own page and 3 other ones, and I’m open to take even more pages under my management – I love to see how my clients pages are growing.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Like I already mentioned, I’ve been present on the Internet since I can remember. I had many blogs, youtube channels, and was always up to date with all of the social media platforms that were around. I started my Instagram account back in 2012 or 13 and have the exact account ever since. I wasn’t really paying too much attention to it at first – it was just for fun like any other social media platform I had in the past, but a few years past by, Instagram also changed and grew more than I expected, so I started to learn all about it while testing every single thing on my account. And that’s when it all started, I slowly but steady started to see growth in engagement and following counts, and more it was growing more I was getting serious about my Instagram account. Today this is my absolute favorite platform to communicate with my followers and it is the easiest platform to get in touch with me.

Any advice for managing a team?

My advice is to find a balance between being friendly and being professional. You gotta make sure your team feels good with you, feels good with each other, and that all of you can trust one another. Without a good and successful team you won’t be successful at all. You have to be a “people’s person” but have some barriers to it as well. You should be friendly but remind a boss, this is a very thin line that not many can maintain, but the second you will learn how to be a good friend and a strict boss at the same time you’ll be on the success train.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pauleanpop

Image Credits
@groganfilms (photo with the piano)